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Morning Five: 04.07.14 Edition

The national title game is set for tonight and we feel fairly confident in saying that nobody saw this one coming on Selection Sunday. Connecticut proved that its victory over Florida in December was no fluke as they beat the Gators by a surprisingly large margin. In the second semifinal, Kentucky continued its goal of giving every single person in the state of Kentucky a heart attack with its fourth straight nail-bitter as they beat Wisconsin by one thanks to yet another late three-pointer by Aaron Harrison. So now we find ourselves in the strange situation of watching two of the most prominent programs in college basketball play for the title as a #7 and #8 seed.

For the sake of Wake Forest fans we hope their new administration got it right with their decision to hire Danny Manning. Manning is best known for leading carrying Kansas to 1988 NCAA title and his time in the NBA, but he also has ties to North Carolina as he went there for high school before a move to Kansas that would have made Twitter explode if it happened today. Manning has coached at Tulsa for two years leading the team to the NCAA Tournament despite losing several players to transfer when he took the job. Manning certainly has a big enough name to get the attention of recruits (or at least their coaches), but the question is whether he can make Winston-Salem a destination for top recruits in an increasingly competitive ACC.

It did not take Ohio very long to move on from the Jim Christian era as they announced the hiring of North Dakota State coach Saul Phillips over the weekend. Phillips compiled a 134-84 record in seven seasons at North Dakota State including two NCAA appearances (2009 and 2014) and one NCAA Tournament victory (this year). Outside of the on-court success Phillips had his push for a bigger and better job was undoubtedly helped by his time serving as the director of basketball operations at Wisconsin under Bo Ryan and his personality that made him a media darling during the opening weekend (you can be sure that his celebration after North Dakota State’s win over Oklahoma win be included in “One Shining Moment” tonight).

It appears that the new target for the public’s ire with regard to unreasonable transfer restrictions will be Nevada based on their limits for Cole Huff‘s transfer. Huff is certainly a solid player as he averaged 12.4 points and 5.4 rebounds per game this season as a sophomore, but we do not understand why a school would restrict his movement so much. Huff is prohibited from transferring to any Mountain West, West Coast, or Pac-12 school as well as any schools that are on Nevada’s scheduled this coming season. So essentially Huff, who is from California, is prohibited from transferring to a school in the Pacific or Mountain time zones. To a degree we can understand limiting a transfer if the school feels like some tampering took place, but this seems excessive.

So about that whole unionization movement… Kain Colter might have won in court (at least at the first level), but now it appears that the players at Northwestern might not even step up to unionize according to football coach Pat Fitzgerald. One of our issues with Colter’s involvement from the beginning was that he essentially did not have any skin in the game since he had already exhausted his eligibility before coming forward. While a vote not to unionize would not permanently cripple the movement it would be a very ugly public setback and would only serve to reinforce the difficulty any such movement would have. To add to that, Mark Emmert also came out yesterday stating that unionization would be a “grossly inappropriate solution” to the issues that college athletics face. As we said before, this has a very long way to go before we see any significant changes.